WhiteFiber Inc. shares surged more than 22% on Thursday after the AI infrastructure company announced a five-year contract worth over $160 million to provide GPU-based compute capacity for an investment-grade customer in the Paris region. The stock closed at $29.55, up 22.2%, and extended gains in after-hours trading to $33.31, according to Google Finance.
The contract, which uses advanced NVIDIA GPU systems, is expected to begin service in July 2026, subject to equipment delivery and customer acceptance. The customer was not named, but WhiteFiber said it has secured third-party data-center capacity in France for the deployment and has entered a binding term sheet for project-level financing, with closing expected in June.
Chief Executive Sam Tabar said the company is seeing strong demand from enterprise customers and that the deal expands WhiteFiber's cloud footprint into Europe. The financing plan includes 12 months of advance service fees from the customer, a structure designed to limit reliance on the company's existing cash reserves.
The rally far outpaced the broader market, with the Nasdaq Composite rising just 0.09% on Thursday, suggesting the move was driven almost entirely by the WhiteFiber news rather than a broad index shift.
WhiteFiber's story, like much of the AI infrastructure trade, hinges on whether the company can convert power, GPUs, and signed customers into recurring revenue. The competitive landscape is crowded and capital-intensive. Reuters reported this month that demand for so-called neocloud providers such as CoreWeave and Nebius has surged as technology companies seek AI hardware and cloud capacity. CoreWeave has been raising capital-spending plans as component costs rise, while Nebius said demand continued to exceed available capacity.
Fresh customer wins are also moving the market. Lambda, an Nvidia-backed AI cloud startup, said on Wednesday it won a contract with Hudson River Trading to rent more than 1,000 of Nvidia's Blackwell systems, Reuters reported. That is the same broad lane WhiteFiber wants to travel: scarce GPUs, large customers, and contracts long enough to finance the hardware.
There is a less clean side to the rally. WhiteFiber reported first-quarter revenue of $21.9 million, up 31% from a year earlier, but posted a net loss of $12.0 million versus net income of $1.4 million a year earlier. Adjusted EBITDA, a profit measure that strips out interest, tax, depreciation, amortisation and certain other items, fell to about $3.0 million from about $6.0 million.
The company has been spending to build the platform. It ended March with $75.8 million in cash and $4.3 million in restricted cash, completed a $230 million convertible-note financing in the first quarter, and said it was still working through a supply-chain issue tied to medium-voltage switchgear at its NC-1 project in North Carolina.
That is the risk paragraph investors will not skip. The Paris contract still depends on equipment delivery, acceptance milestones and the June financing close; delays could push out revenue, and a not-yet-named customer gives the market limited information on end-user demand. A strong headline contract helps, but WhiteFiber still has to deliver the racks, power and uptime.
For now, traders have treated the deal as proof that WhiteFiber can win business outside North America. The next checks are more mechanical: close the project financing, start service in July, and show that the new contract can add durable revenue without forcing the company back to the market for more capital.
